It is frustrating to see how Twitter safeguards its own ecosystem and paralyzes non-tech users like us by making it so awkward to create RSS feeds. Twitter struck again at the end of October last year, by removing the atom feed from their services. Is there a simple non-technical way around it? Well it might be connected to a bit of extra work and tweaking, but it’s well worth putting the effort into it.1. Identifying your Twitter #hashtags (keywords)There is a fabulous tool called “What Hashtag” (freely given to us by a Spanish group of programmers) that does a reliable job at researching and selecting the most popular Twitter-hashtags. Let’s say we are trying to find the proper Twitter-hashtags (and those are very specific) for ‘social business’. In our ‘social business’ search we shall include the Boolean operator “quote” in order to single out the results for “social business” only:

You may notice that each word is hyperlinked to its corresponding Twitter-feed: very handy indeed. It is now easier to identify the community connected to the “#socbiz” word or Twitter hashtag. A word of caution please: run the search several times and update it on a regular basis because things change fast on the Twittosphere.The second tool is presented to us by Dan Zarrella: Tweetcharts.com. Tweetcharts goes one step further by giving us a full array of added information: – General statistics about links, retweets, replies, mentions, hashtags– Top words and most mentioned users– Other corresponding hashtags, links and media (images and videos)Before we start creating RSS feeds, we need to understand a bit about encoding. The Albion Research Ltd. application “encodes or decodes a string using URL Encoding. URL Encoding is used when placing text in a query string to avoid it being confused with the URL itself. It is normally used when the browser sends form data to a web server.” So here is an example for us to try: Plain Text:Hey What’s the heck with social media? Encoded Text:Hey%20what’s%20the%20heck%20with%20social%20media%3F

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=@dpontefract OR @Euan OR @hjarche OR @jonhusband OR @KateNasser OR @rashkenas OR @rhappe OR @rossdawson OR @tdebaillon OR @BrunoGebarskiNow paste this string into the Albionresearch.com website to obtain he following encoded feed:

Remove unwanted spaces (due to blog formatting) and paste this final RSS feed into your reader, but first do not forget to replace the names, including mine, with the Tweeps of your choice! Now you have your personalized twitter stream as an RSS feed with all the authors you wish to keep up with. Easy and simple is not it?Now it’s your turn: How do you keep up with your favorite Tweeps? Any tools you would recommend? Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.Please follow me on Twitter:http://Twitter.com/BrunoGebarski